The assignee of the present invention manufactures and deploys spacecraft for, inter alia, communications and broadcast services.
Such a spacecraft includes a telemetry, command and ranging (TC&R) subsystem, that enables a ground control station (“ground station”) to command the spacecraft, monitor performance and health of the spacecraft, and determine the spacecraft's position (range) with respect to the ground station.
The TC&R subsystem equipment will normally be provided with at least 2:1 redundancy and the spacecraft can therefore tolerate, with no degradation in performance, a failure of at least a single component within the TC&R subsystem. Nevertheless, because a failure of the TC&R subsystem may result in complete loss of the entire spacecraft, techniques for mitigating impacts of component failures are desirable. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,735,501, assigned to the assignee of the present disclosure, and hereby incorporated into the present disclosure in its entirety for all purposes, describes techniques for mitigating impacts of failures within a spacecraft command subsystem.